The current development towards truly mobile computing and networking has brought on the evolvement of various access technologies, which also provide the users with access to the Internet when they are outside their own home network. The first public communication network that provides a truly ubiquitous World Wide Web (WWW) access is the GSM-based mobile telephone network.
So far, the use of the Internet has been dominated by person-to-machine communications, i.e. information services. The evolution towards the so-called third generation (3G) wireless networks brings along mobile multimedia communications, which will also change the way IP-based services are utilized in public mobile networks. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), as specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), integrates mobile voice communications with Internet technologies, allowing IP-based multimedia services to be utilized in mobile networks.
The new multimedia capable mobile terminals (multimedia phones) provide an open development platform for application developers, allowing independent application developers to design new services and applications for the multimedia environment. The users may, in turn, download the new applications/services to their mobile terminals and use them therein.
A drawback related to the open development platform is the possibility to use fraudulent applications. At present, the mobile terminals and the mobile communication environment lack sufficient technical means for ascertaining that the applications developed for the open platform behave in an appropriate and rightful manner. This allows deceptive application developers to misuse the new communication environment and to develop applications that behave contrary to the agreements made with the operator of the network, for example.
The present invention seeks to eliminate the above-described drawback.